


And They All Wore Suits

by TheElusiveOllie



Category: Marble Hornets
Genre: Anachronistic, Anxiety, Character Study, Depression, Experimental Style, Gen, Obsessive Paranoia, POV Third Person Limited, Paranoia, Progressive Ramblings of a Madman, canon character death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-10
Updated: 2015-10-10
Packaged: 2018-04-25 18:27:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,065
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4971685
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheElusiveOllie/pseuds/TheElusiveOllie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first year, it’s nothing more than an intriguing side project. It takes over everything. Of course it takes over everything.</p>
<p>--</p>
<p>An ode to the misguided, desperate, determined cameraman who poured everything he was into looking for answers he never found.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And They All Wore Suits

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired, obviously, by Rowan's beautiful and heartrending album (https://rowanlewis.bandcamp.com/album/human-therefore-no). If you haven't given it a listen, I highly encourage it.
> 
> Warnings for this fic include: heavy dissociation and unreality, depression, nausea and emetophobia (vomiting), mild body horror, mild suicide ideation, self-harm, incredibly extreme paranoia and anxiety, and heavy themes of mortality and peril.

The first year, it’s nothing more than an intriguing side project. It takes over everything. Of course it takes over everything. He has nothing but the structured regimen of class and then home again, perusing bags of tapes until the faded red bars on the digital clock are in the single digits, and it gives him an old thrill of remembering the thankless, useless, _stupid_ stresses of volunteering to be a part of Alex Kralie’s student film project.

At first it’s memories. They hit in a brutal tailspin, ticking down those old half-remembered pathways until he can’t trace them back to their origins. _Script supervisor,_ right? He was the script supervisor, wasn’t he? Or was that Seth?

The lines of that god-awful script hum back much more slowly, and the faces aren’t as clear.

The weeks inch past, and then they blur. When’s class? When’s he supposed to be moving out? Someone graduated last week. Someone sent him an email, but he hasn’t checked it. Someone contacted him. Someone sent him a text.

After a while, someone stops. He falls off the digital map. It’s not that hard. You have to have people who will miss you in order to be missed.

The tapes are cards and someone’s still got half the deck. Alex, maybe. Come to think of it, Alex hasn’t contacted him in a while.

Maybe he should call him sometime.

\--

Maybe the channel wasn’t such a great idea. There’ve gotta be some merits in crowdsourcing, though, and he needs answers. Wants them. Needs them. There are tapes, there are answers, there are voices, there are footsteps. He winds them back and scrubs them as clean as he can, winds them back again. There are horrible things imprinted in the background of crisp white static and the backs of his lids.

There are things he doesn’t remember saying, jokes he doesn’t remember telling, people he doesn’t remember meeting face-to-face, eye-to-eye. Maybe it’s something the doctors tell him about. Maybe he’s sick. He’s sick, but he feels fine. Cold, though, and often. Chilly.

He’s not an editor. His cuts are clumsy, his text peppered with typos. Maybe now and then there’s a hot tingle in his fingers, the jump of the wrist from mouse to keyboard, and he wonders - if muscles can retain what the mind cannot. Maybe he was an editor. There’s no way to know. There’s no way to remember what’s real.

Alex lived with this.

Alex lived with this for _years._

Dial the number. Dial it again. Again, again, again.

Where are you, Alex. What’d you get yourself into.

\--

There are shadows, he swears, that slip from place to place when he isn’t looking. He stops scrolling through footage to look over his shoulder, once a minute, twice a minute. He pauses and tilts his head and listens. His heart pounds in his throat until his ribs ache. He keeps his eyes on the screen. He keeps his eyes on the screen and he keeps cutting footage and cleaning it as much as he can because if he looks up if he looks _up_ he’ll see it he knows he will that thing will come looming out of the gloom for him with its white canvas of a face and it’ll reach for his heart.

Windows shut, curtains drawn. There’s safety in the glare of the monitor. He’s lost little pieces of himself, pale strands of cobweb-memory stretched thin between the hours in which he sits and loses himself in the story uncurling minute by minute on the tapes.

Have you dropped out of class, Jay?

You need to be a student to keep living on campus.

I know. I’m sorry.

\--

Jay? Jay, sweetie, why haven’t you called?

Sorry. Sorry. It’s just been - I’ve been busy.

I know, I know, and I thought you might be, you just, you work yourself so hard. I just feel like I haven’t talked to you in months!

I know. Sorry, uh. Guess I lost track of the time.

No, no, I know you’re busy. I just wanted to call and - see how you were.

I’m good. I’m okay.

You’re sure?

Everything’s fine, Mom.

\--

People don’t wake up screaming. They don’t catapult themselves from their beds, gasping and sobbing like they do in movies. They wake up paralyzed, hands fisted into sheets soaked with cold sweat, their hearts juddering in their thin chests and their breath raw and burning and ragged and they lie there, frozen, shaking, unable to scrub the burning afterimage of the nightmare from the contours of their skull. When the night fades and the first rays of sun cut through the closed blinds, they can’t relax, and they can’t breathe easy. There’s something out to get them. The time of day doesn’t change that.

On the rare occasion when he can wake up without having been torn away from the many-clawed things scuttling around in his head, he lies there and can’t move. He wants to. He needs to. The groceries he bought are moldering away on the counter. He’s been wearing the same shirt for a week. He hasn’t showered, hasn’t slept. He needs to look at the tapes, peruse them for the umpteenth time for a clue, for some kind of new sign.

And he tells himself that, over and over, and he can’t move. He lies there. He lies there and looks at the cheap plaster ceiling and can’t muster the energy to rise.

Classes on hold. Degree on hold. Life on hold. Where’s Alex where’s Alex where’s Alex.

Jay.

Jay?

Jay, honey? You still haven’t called. Hello? Where are you, Jay? Can you pick up? Are you all right?

Are you sick?

\--

He shovels himself deeper into debt. It’s the only way to keep moving. Can’t stay in the same place for too long. He has to look over his shoulder, and he has to start filming, like Alex did. Alex had the right idea (where’s Alex where’s Alex where’s Alex) because he knows, now, the fallible nature of the mind. How easily it’s tricked. How quickly and inelegantly it can be fooled.

Cameras are better. They’re harder to tamper with. They glitch and fuzz and break, but they can catch what the mind glosses over, what the brain refuses to see. He has to keep one on him. Bags of tapes in the trunk. Laptop tossed into a duffel and crammed into the backseat of a car. He walks with a nervous glance to either side and behind him every ten paces. He drives without looking back.

\--

He can’t go to sleep.

He can’t go to sleep.

What happens to him when he’s asleep? What takes him? Where does he go? Who knows him? Who gives him the anonymous tips? Who’s following him? Who leaves cryptic videos dotted like tumors behind each entry?

He doesn’t remember going outside. He doesn’t remember.

What happens to him. Where does he _go._

He can’t go to sleep.

He waits with his jaw tense, cameras rigged, flashlight clutched in his hand and his eyes itching and his throat raw from coughing and his head dropping to his chest every five minutes.

He can’t go to sleep.

He can’t.

\--

He’d couchsurf if he had any friends to speak of. Maybe Tim would take him in, or Seth, or Sarah, or Brian. Too bad he can’t remember where any of them live. They’ve fallen clean off the map. He can’t even remember their last names.

Alex. Alex Kralie. That becomes the most important name in his life. Alex lived through it. Alex knows what’s on those tapes. He must’ve known. He got through it and he lived. How did he do it. How does he sleep. Does he still film himself. Does he spend his days driving from town to town, sleeping in his car and in grainy hotels with too-lumpy beds and the rattle of tapes in his trunk. Is he still out there. Is he still alive.

He watches old footage to remind himself that Alex Kralie existed. It feels obvious once he watches those tapes over, but the obvious doesn’t feel so obvious anymore. He watches his own face say that he’s been supervising that, because he’s the script supervisor, and strains to remember what it was to be looking out from that pair of eyes from under the brim of that hat and it feels like it’s coming from another person. It doesn’t look real, it doesn’t feel like it happened. He looks at his hands and pulls them into fists and rolls back the footage and watches again.

Alex Kralie was real. Alex Kralie exists.

He just needs to reminds himself sometimes.

He can’t be sure of anything anymore.

\--

More time slips between his fingers, memories scattering when they make contact with his head. He buys several brands of painkillers and finds every bottle empty before the end of the first week. Maybe it feels like a week. Maybe it’s been longer.

He checks the date obsessively. The clock doesn’t lie. The camera doesn’t lie. He keeps one filming him at all times, just to see what his memories dissolve into in the times when he can’t remember how he got from one place to the next. When the cameras stop working, he tells himself it doesn’t matter. It feels like losing a friend. It tastes like failure.

He keeps everyone updated. People seem to care about him. Or maybe, like him, they just care about the answers. He skips from one place to the next and the year jumps by.

\--

When his apartment burns down it’s an anticlimactic event. Someone calls him. He doesn’t remember who. He doesn’t worry about it. He forgets a lot of things these days.

He stares at the hotel’s television screen numbly, then reaches for the remote and switches it off.

He doesn’t live there anymore. It doesn’t matter.

\--

He can erase this. He can start over. He’s done it already, even if he didn’t know it. He can just do it again.

He can erase this. Wipe himself clean. Start over. New college, new campus. New job. Keep his head down. He films himself for the small following he’s amassed online. He says it’s for the best. He says he’s been feeling less paranoid. He says it’s been dying down. It has, hasn’t it? It has.

This will be the last entry that he’ll be posting. He won’t do this anymore.

Alex Kralie can stop existing, become that forgotten nonentity in his muddy past. Maybe he was never even real. He can forget the evidence the man was ever a figure in his life. Forget most of it, and destroy the rest.

The tapes? Burn them.

He bags them and knots the bag at the top with the whisper of thin plastic. He gets as far as the door before he stops and turns back and crams them back into the duffel for no reason he can really discern. He kicks the duffel under the bed and lies down. He feels dizzy. Sick. The questions have all taken root in him, coiled taut in his gut like something leaking and cancerous. What happened. Where’s Alex. What’s going on. He doesn’t care anymore. God, but he doesn’t care.

That’s when someone knocks.

\--

No one could’ve known.

He’s kept his location undisclosed.

In the box is a tape, and on it is -

\--

Alex? says a man, the word a whisper and a prayer. Alex?

\--

He wakes up in November, April and all the months in between liquified into nothing. He’s lost time before. He’s lost those precious moments, stolen in between the deep rattling coughs and the times when he shuts his eyes and pretends he still remembers how to sleep. He’s never lost this much. What happened to him. What happened.

Where’s Alex. What happened.

He makes a list of things he knows without question exist. Hotel room. Camera. Camera strapped to his chest (that’s a good idea - why didn’t he think of that? Maybe he did, and that’s the thing. Maybe he did).

Adjoining room, and in it is someone he’s never seen before. He walks around her and makes sure their eyes never meet.

What’s that under your jacket? she asks.

Oh this, he stammers, is a, it’s a camera.

\--

They have adjoining rooms. He scours his mind for any trace of familiarity, for anything about her face and her room that invites the itch, the persistent niggling that lets him know when it’s something he’s forgotten. Unreliable. Undependable. His brain can’t hold onto anything for longer than a few moments these days. He loses it. Has lost it. It skitters out from his grasp despite his efforts to cling to it with everything he has. The camera is empty. No footage informs him as to what happened between April and November.

Stupid, stupid, stupid. Doesn’t he know that filming is the only way to be sure of anything anymore. Nothing else sticks. Nothing else sticks.

Who’s Jessica, and how does she know him.

\--

_What_ is going on? says Jessica, her eyes wild, her nerves as frayed and fizzling as his. The desperate _please_ goes unspoken in the undercurrent of her tone _help help help_ and he knows he can’t lie to her. She’s just as bad as him. Maybe worse. Maybe they need each other. Maybe they need this.

Where’s Alex. Take the camera. Forget the mysteries. Forget the safe. Get her out. Get him out. They can run and figure things out, stitch together their timeline where it fractured and fell apart. This isn’t coincidental. His mind’s been scraped clean too often for that. He can do this. The answers don’t matter. He’s been given a chance to sever the ties from this, to start anew. Isn’t that what he wanted. Isn’t that what he needed. He has to do this. Cut himself loose from the mysteries, and _help her._

\--

A story unspools from the tapes unearthed from the safe. Alex. _Alex._ He found him. He _met_ him. And something happened, something with Tim and a mask and a block of cement. Tim - it’s been Tim. Maybe if he could ever remember actually meeting Tim it would feel more like a betrayal. It just feels like a dull realization, retroactively obvious. Tim spirited Jessica out of the hotel and he was supposed to be next, but he got out. Good luck, shit luck, and he can’t decide if it matters anymore. He has to know what happened. He has to unarchive the answers. Where’s Alex. Where’s _Jessica._

Why can’t he remember.

\--

His brain drums at the interior of his skull. Walking makes him dizzy, and sitting at his laptop makes it worse. He lies down, and he can still hear the hot-tin machine-gun rattle of something clattering inside his head, the many-legged spider running laps around the curves of bone that make his eye sockets. The world goes slow and gray and drools out of the corners of his vision. He barely coordinates his fingers to punch in a muddled message on his phone, some formless attempt to update the people who might still be as desperate for answers as he is.

Hotels. Hotels. Hotels. In and out again and breath snatched between coughs and painkillers that don’t stop the clear, bright leucotome of pain lanced between his eyes. He sinks into slurries of unsleep, infrequent heaves of nausea rousing him to drag himself to the bathroom and lie down there instead, the unhacked coughs curled hot and sick in his throat. Every step is a vertiginous nightmare. His skin is too hot and it prickles with every twitching stimulus, air friction made icy like knives and the tickling coarseness of the bathroom rug jabbing into him, needles pricking his bare skin. He can’t move and he can’t lie still. His vision tosses in and out in photobleached colors, wreathed in shadows and bleeding brightness away until he closes his eyes, which only conjures up reminders of the faceless thing that watches. Maybe it’s watching him now. He swears he can hear things creeping behind him, leaching up his ears and in through his nose as they burrow deeper inside of him. He coughs wetly, his body buckling under the convulsive strain. Can’t sleep, can’t sleep, so he opens his eyes again and is rewarded by a clean stab of pain to his temples.

His stomach catches in dry heaves that disgorge nothing, because he’s eaten nothing for days, nothing but coffee and the gummy protein bars that stick in half-digested clumps to the backs of his teeth and the roof of his mouth. He shivers wildly, thin shoulders racked with tremors and chills he can’t claw out of him no matter how he tries. His limbs seize. He can’t get up. He can’t move. He can’t roll over. He wants more than anything to die. Is this how it happens. Is this how his mind goes dark and blank and lifeless. Is this what happens when he sleeps.

\--

He watches a man who is him and is not him talk to Alex with the angry twist of bitterness in his tone, and he watches Alex with a cold brow and a dark look and a hint of beard chasing his jaw snap out a not-answer to every question. Alex points, and he goes. Alex withholds answers. Alex dribbles information at him drop by tantalizing drop and keeps the rest selfishly sealed away to himself.

The man on the tapes knows he’s being played, knows he’s being marched blindly along, and knows he has no other choice but to follow meekly like a dog on a leash. When he braves it alone, that’s when hands reach for him and the things that creep behind him snatch at him with arched claws.

More masked things stalk him, and more nights jerk past in a fitful, feverish jolt. How many things out there know what he knows, and how many know more. What happens to him when he sleeps. Where’s Alex.

He can’t take this. It’s been years. He should’ve burned those tapes when he had the chance. He should have. Alex was right. Burn them. He almost does, several times. But it keeps scratching the edges of his brain and he can’t put them down and he can’t relinquish the only hold he has over the things that slink along behind him. When they come for him, he has to be ready. He needs to be armed.

\--

What happens to Alex when he sleeps. Does he dream anymore. Does it pull him along like its puppet or did he go willingly. It lurks behind his shoulder like an old friend, that familiar elongated shadow, and Alex doesn’t turn to face it. He must know it’s there. He must know it’s there. He must know.

 _I’ll kill you,_ snarls Alex, and the screen jumps and his voice turns into a legion and prickles run down arms and the coughs dislodge themselves wildly from his lungs and he staggers to the bathroom, hands braced against either side of the sink, and he gulps and sweats and gasps and doesn’t know what it means.

He watches him watch Alex without Alex knowing it. He watches Alex pitch a boulder onto a nameless man’s head and _I told you not to follow me._ He watches Alex walk away and he watches his too-tall shadow sputter onto the screen in a shriek of static to dispose of the remains. He watches Alex doom an old friend to be scalped by the empty-faced thing that lingers for too long and is gone between blinks. He watches himself contact Jessica. He watches himself lead her straight into the barrel of Alex’s gun. He watches Tim hook an arm around Alex’s neck and yank him away. He watches himself howl at the thing in the room with him and demand to know _what it wants_ and that it _leave them alone_ and he watches the man who isn’t him hurl himself at it and the digital image of himself bleach to white and the horrible, awful, unbearable screech of things tearing open other things and eviscerating the seven months that made him _him,_ digging them clean out and burning them to ash.

He watches himself die.

He’s still here, but the man in the footage is dead.

He packs the tapes and the hard drive and his laptop and the camera, and he leaves the area without looking back.

\--

He glimpses the familiar slope of shoulders as a man who isn’t wearing a mask lights a cigarette. He glimpses him and he follows him and waits outside a brick-and-mortar mental health clinic for the familiar shape to come again.

Tim must be good at lying. He says he doesn’t remember. His eyes are dark and earnest, but he can’t afford to be blithely giving away his trust. He doesn’t want to end up at the other end of a gun again. He can’t remember how it happened, but he has to be careful. He stammers and stumbles over his speech. Stupid, stupid.

I, uh, helped you - or like, you helped, he says, You and I both helped Alex Kralie with his student film, _Marble Hornets,_ like a few years ago. You remember that?

Tim scratches the back of his neck. Yeah, kinda, he says, slow and bewildered. That was kinda a long time ago, wasn’t it?

He doesn’t remember or he’s lying about remembering. He can’t let him slip from between his fingers so he waits for him to come back out. Wait, wait, wait. He’s gotten good at waiting. He passes the time viciously digging into his brain for any trace of the things he can’t remember. To no avail. Always to no avail.

\--

More tapes, and more moments where Alex dooms his friends, the people who knew him and cared about him, to some unknown fate between the winding halls of a burned-out hospital, the walls blackened and blistered and scarred. How many of those early days were pocked with instances where he did the same to all of them. How many times was his mind rubbed clean and empty. Is this why he can’t remember. Is this what this was.

He stole those moments, one by one. He stole them and hid them in the thin strips of film wound back in tapes and he never intended to give them back. He took those parts of everyone from them, and selfishly kept them to himself. He didn’t even want them, not really. He intended to burn them. He intended to set them alight and let everyone forget what he _did_ to them.

He dials Tim, the movements choppy and unpracticed. They need to meet. They need to go to the hospital, and Tim is going to take him there.

\--

Student film, _you lying piece of -_

He twists as he lands. No. No. No. How did he know. How did he find out. Alex? He can’t have found him. Alex can’t have seized onto that last strand of mystery and torqued it, pulled its strings until it rebelled. He can’t have. Or maybe he did. Turning everything against him. They’re being watched, _they’re being watched_ can’t Tim see that?

Tim snarls at him between coughs and sobs. Why can’t he see. Why can’t he see this is all there is. The answers, and the lengths to get to them. Alex is out there. Jessica is out there. The hooded man is out there, they’re _out there_ and they’re _waiting_ for them. He saw the entries. He must have known. That _thing_ that _nightmare_ chasing after him at all hours of the night Tim knows it’s there Tim remembers it he must he has to and _why can’t he see it._

But then suddenly it stops, rails Tim, And I start getting _better._ And I can hold steady work, I can function like a human being for once in my life. And then suddenly _you_ show up, _pointing a camera in my face,_ bringing back old memories like it couldn’t _possibly_ have any effect anyone else!

He takes a step back. He has to. Tim’s face is streaked with tears.

And you’re not even trying to _fix_ any of this. You just point your camera at every little thing that happens - how does that _help_ anyone?

It helps. It has to help. He knows it does. The people watching are relying on him. Doesn’t Tim understand, the existential _terror_ of remembering what you can’t remember.

It’s not his fault. It’s not his fault. People are out there. People care. People need to know.

Like _who?_ Who the hell is gonna care?

He knows people care. They care about the answers. He’s just the vehicle for those answers, the nameless conduit, but that doesn’t matter. They need those answers as much as he does. Maybe more.

I’ve seen it myself. Alex points a gun at you and your first instinct is to _film_ it, you _psychopath._

He’s not. He’s _not._ He’s not wrong, he’s not twisted, he’s not some freak puppet propelled by dark, invisible strings, he’s _not -_

_Shut up!_

_Listen to me._

I’m not a psychopath! It’s all Alex’s fault, him and - whatever it is that follows him around. Somehow they’re responsible for me being this way, and you knew about it. You knew about it for _three years_ and you never said a _thing!_

He can’t have known. He _can’t have known._ Tim, _listen -_

Maybe Alex isn’t even the problem. Maybe _you’re_ the problem.

No.

He’s not. 

He’s trying to _fix_ this.

He’s trying to _help._

He’s helping. He is. He told Alex so, snapped it to his face.

_You think you’re making such a huge difference?_

_Yeah, I do._

He’s helping. He’s uncovering the answers as quickly as he can. He just has to find Jessica, dig her out of this. Tim, Tim _listen._

No, you listen to _me,_ growls Tim. You can keep making your little detective videos all you want, but do me a favor and _stay out of my life._

No, no, no no no no _no_ this isn’t how it’s meant to happen. It’s Alex. It’s _Alex._ He’s already driven a wedge between them, can’t he see that? It’s already been orchestrated. They can’t fall for that. They can’t slip between the cracks. Tim, come back. Just listen. Just _listen._ There are things out there, they’re looking for you. I need answers. I need you. Tim, please. No, god, please. Please. _Please._

He didn’t mean for this to happen.

He just

It’s

It’s all Alex’s fault. It has to be.

He must have gotten to Tim first.

He had to have.

\--

He wonders idly how many of these symptoms pertain to him. Anhedonia. Hopelessness. Helplessness. Listlessness. They’re really not so different. Gaps of time lost. How many of those painkillers vanished down his gullet in a haze of unconscious thought. He could have been self-medicating for years now, and he’d never know.

Tim seizes and sinks into a void and the other part of him curls out of the woodwork. The same could be happening to him and he’d never know. Maybe that’s what happens when he sleeps. Maybe that’s what happens when he dreams.

Tim’s out there. His cheekbone still stings where he hit him, but he picks up the camera and goes.

He has to get there before Alex does. Before _it_ does.

This is his only chance.

\--

This is where he goes when he sleeps. This is what happens.

He wakes up in Rosswood, Tim a disordered sprawl in the grass. They exchange flat words and cold looks from the corners of their eyes.

Please. Please, can’t you see it. We need to work together. That’s the only way this goes away. That’s the only way it stops. Alex is out there. That _thing_ is out there.

Tim looks at him, his eyes dark with distrust, and the battery runs out.

\--

Tim walks in front of him. It feels uncomfortably like holding him at gunpoint. They both know it’s a precaution. He’s nothing like Alex. He wants answers, not closure smeared in blood. He wants to track the loose ends to their conclusion, not tie them off. He wants to find Jessica to save her, not to leave her shot through and bleeding. The smell of smoke lingers in his nostrils every time Tim exhales. He stumps after him, through Rosswood, through abandoned building after abandoned building, through the tunnel stained with a dead man’s blood.

_Leave. Now._

And the world detonates.

\--

_R_  
u  
n

chokes Tim, the word torn by coughs and hoarse and rasping.

Tim, get _up._ Tim, _we have to go._

He tugs on the other man’s arm, pale spidery little hand wrapped tight around his. He can’t leave him. He can’t leave his only lead, the only person who will even _tolerate_ him anymore. Tim, come on, please. Come on, no, not again not again not again not _again_ but it stalks closer and closer and closer and closer and closer and and and and and

Tim told him to run and so he runs.

He wheezes, his mouth dry and the camera dipping to the ground and every gasp pinching his lungs. He makes to the parking lot, to the car.

Tim?

Tim.

_Tim._

Tim looks at him, his eyes sunken and shadowed. The car jerks away from under Jay’s hand as it pulls out.

Tim, wait.

_Tim._

And he’s gone.

\--

He doesn’t believe in hell. Didn’t. Didn’t and doesn’t. Maybe now, a little, but not in any kind of conventional sense. If hell is real, he’s already been. He’s already living there, day after day after day after day, lifeless but for how his heart continues to beat and his lungs continue to stagger and he hunches over the sink in a hotel bathroom as he spits out phlegm and blood between every cough. These are his mornings. This is his life. He chokes out a hymn of glass shards stuck in his windpipe and the burning itch behind his eyes that hasn’t really gone away since that first sleepless night when he first unearthed those old tapes. His hell isn’t tangible. It’s in the way he can’t see into the corners of himself and how he has to wonder if any important pieces of him have gone missing in the last few hours and in how he’s caught, stuck, trapped in this sisyphean roundabout like a fish on a hook, puppet tangled in its strings, a stick-legged insect snarled in netting.

He watches Tim fight to breach the surface of water, snapped from place to place with the unholy howl of static screaming in the distance, torn laterally from the tall dark silhouettes of trees to high above them in the sky to in the dark shadowed place without light, where the headless body flops lifelessly beneath his hands like a gutted fish. He watches Tim sob, curled in the corner of a hospital room like a child. He watches a man ensnared in his personal hell, and he watches in the sole interest of peeling back the layers of what was done to him and tracing it to the thing that did it.

Tim’s screams don’t haunt him. His mind is too full to be perturbed by things like that anymore.

They steal through blackened labyrinthine hallways with their charred rafters and the places where the paint peeled and popped in old phantom flames and every nerve is tingling. Tim sinks to the floor again and a sob stutters out from between his lips.

I’m saying _what if this my fault?_

What if I’m right?

And Jay doesn’t have an answer.

\--

Jay, sweetie, please call us back.

_beep_

Jay, please pick up. We’re starting to worry.

_beep_

Jay, please answer. Where are you? Are you all right?

_beep_

We called the university and they said you weren’t enrolled anymore. Once you get this message, please call us back. Just to let us know you’re all right.

_beep_

Jay. Jay, can you please answer? Where are you? What’s going on?

\--

He watches tires chew up road as he follows Tim or Tim follows him and they retrace their steps. He can’t decide if it feels better or worse having someone else. He can’t decide if he can be content that someone’s watching his back or if he needs to be watching Tim instead. He could be lying. Alex could’ve gotten to him first. He doesn’t know how much of Tim is really still in there. He doesn’t know how much of himself is still in his head, either, and that’s what stays him from turning off and leaving the other man in his tracks.

Dig up more tapes, more evidence, more flickers of things glimpsed in the corner of his eye. Roll the camera back. Clean the dust and grit from the tapes and wind them back and hope they still play.

They do.

What he sees makes his jaw clench.

Alex didn’t get to Tim first.

First he got to _Jay._

What is he. What _is_ he. How much of him was dug out in those early days. Did Alex leave him for that _thing_ like he did Brian and Tim and the nameless man whose blood is on his hands? Who was he before then. Who _was_ he. Who was he and how much of him is left.

Tim says it’s not his fault. He tells Tim he knows. He knows, Tim. Stop trying to comfort him. Stop trying to balm this over. There’s no smoothing it over, and besides - he needs to think.

He just needs to think.

If only his head would stop pounding long enough for him to _think._

\--

It’s not your fault, says Tim.

I know that’s kind of a difficult thing to deal with, says Tim. But just remember, you’re not the only one. That helps

I guess, he says dully. It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that Alex managed to hide things from him even then.

\--

He rides the cresting waves of his own nausea in every lurch of his chest and skipped beat of his heart, like a tape run backwards and a camera torn through with static. He cuts through Rosswood and cuts his arm on a sharpened end of branch, and ribbons of tape whip out from the gash and wind around him, binding him to the tree where it waits. It has roots, arms like branches, skeleton fingers that scratch the sky. Sometimes he’s sinking and sometimes he’s gliding and sometimes he’s leaking himself into oil slick dark puddles and sometimes he can’t remember - he can’t remember - he can’t remember - he can’t remember -

What is it he can’t remember?

He can’t remember.

A white capsule gets pushed past his lips and he drinks the water and it scalds him as it runs down his throat, ice burning into his stomach in trails. He speaks in halting fragments, asking, begging for someone to tell him what it is he can’t remember. Jay. Jay. Jay. That’s his name, isn’t it? Is it - or is it Alex. He arches in agony, his shirt sticking the sweat streaked down his back. The spiderweb latticework of thick blue veins pulse weakly beneath the sickly alabaster of his hands, cording down his arms and all the way straight to his heart. Sometimes the skin withers away to dust and beneath the bones of his fingers flex into fists and bubble into great claws, his bones grinding and popping as his spine stretches to fill the sky. Sometimes he’s spluttering in the wet grass with his limbs jerking in a paroxysmal shudder he can’t put a name to. His muscles clench and contort and he thrashes against invisible restraints. Hospital, hospital - was he ever in a hospital? Flames chase up and down the walls and all along his bleached-white bones and into the raging cacophony in his head, his _head,_ his head which never stopped pounding and he wonders what it would be like to live without that tumultuous _ache_ stitched into every bone, every inch of his gray matter, yoked behind his eyes so every blink is excruciating and every flex of his jaw gilds that bright piercing with the familiar, the tangible, visceral, tainted ache. He sees himself in the mirror, shrunken patchwork skeleton with the skin stretched too tightly over sharp-angled bones, gaunt and hollow-cheeked with ragged purple crescents hung beneath both eyes with the scattered bloodshot snarl of veins staining their whites. His tongue tingles with the salt of sweat. His nostrils are thick with the reek of it. He tries to swallow, tries to speak, but his tongue is too swollen and dry to do anything more than peek out between parched lips, the skin cracked and broken with beads of blood every time the corner of his mouth twitches. Chills shiver up his spine but every other part of him is burning. The world has become gray again, day and night made interchangeable. Something, he thinks, was done to him, some trigger was pressed, some ripcord was pulled.

He just can’t remember what.

\--

He tears from the hospital - _hotel_ bed, hands flying over the bedside table when he realizes the camera isn’t there and no lens has been trained on him. He can’t let it out of his sight, not for a minute. He remembers the seven months, even if he doesn’t. He tears through the room in a stumbling panic, frantic. Where is it. Where _is_ it, he _needs it._

Tim seems surprised to see him standing, and walks him back into the room.

Why’d you take the camera with you? he asks. His voice sounds dull enough to be misconstrued as steady instead of the stabbing indictment he knows it is. I woke up and it wasn’t here. I thought it’d been stolen or something, I was kinda freaking out.

We agreed before I left, remember? says Tim, You said you wanted me to keep recording everything in case something happened and...you couldn’t.

Did something happen?

His tone is low and listless, the quiet, terrified undertow trembling beneath. What happened. What happened that he can’t see. He can’t put his faith in a liar. Alex taught him that. And Alex taught him, also, that the camera is only the faithful thing he still has. The camera is all he can trust, and Tim still has it. His fingers itch, aching for the press and click of a RECORD button, the smooth grip of the camera that fits evenly around his hand. He needs to take it back. As soon as they leave, he’ll ask for it back. Or he’ll take it.

Yeah, says Tim, the word filled with weight and warning. You’ve been - pretty out of it since we went back to Alex’s old house.

The words should inspire a thrill of memory in him, but they don’t. He strains. There was something there. They went back, didn’t they. They went back, and into the basement, and then he loses the thread. What happens to him when he sleeps.

Honestly, Tim is saying, This is the most coherent you’ve been since we got back.

Ice runs through him. What does Tim know. Thinks he can be trusted, does he?

The only thing I can think of is - the medication. Which is why I’ve been sharing them with you since we got back, just to be safe.

No. No, no, no no no _no_ what did he _do._ He stiffens, going rigid on the edge of the hotel bed. What’s he done. What’s he done. He’s been giving him that synthetic white stuff, feeding him, _poisoning_ him? He did. No, and now he remembers. He did. He _did._ He crammed his medication down his throat and he didn’t ask and what gave him the _right._ What ever gave him the right. He’s a liar, barely a cut above Alex for what he’s done. The betrayal rests dark and thick in his gut, curdling into bile. His pale knuckles blanch as he coils his hands into fists.

Tim doesn’t understand, does he. Of course he doesn’t. He was _born_ broken, never got to know the sensation of being worn down and pieced apart fraction by fraction. He doesn’t know the bitter taste of being unraveled and reraveled and knowing that the heat death of self has already happened half a dozen times over.

He doesn’t say anything more as Tim gives him the cheap gas station food that serves as their dinner. He doesn’t look at the lens glaring at him with its unblinking dark eye. He chews slowly, the resentment burning a searing trail down his throat.

Alex got to him first. He must have.

He holds the words in his mind. It’s with a sick surge of satisfaction that he reminds himself that now he has all the proof he needs. Traitor. Traitor. Traitor.

\--

There’s a tape in Tim’s old house. He follows Tim inside, up the ladder and into the nest of blankets and detritus where Alex once lived. He turns over a photo of Amy and tucks it into his pocket. Was she next on Alex’s list. How long ago did he raze her from the world. He can’t remember. Maybe she never existed either.

He creeps downstairs, rifling through plastic bags and boxes and searching, desperate, frantic, growling his frustration, for the tape he knows he _knows_ must still be there. It must be it has to be it -

It’s raised a small rectangle in the denim of Tim’s jeans. The tape-shaped lump in his pocket. Tim bumbles on, oblivious, leaving him to chew on the sickening rage boiling in his throat. When Tim’s back is to him, he seizes the opportunity and slams into him and rams him into the wall, one hand tight around his throat.

Give me the tape, he growls. I know you have it. _Give it to me!_

Tim’s bigger, and he throws him off. He tears after, hits Tim in the middle like a bullet and brings them both to the ground. Tim’s fingernails rake across him and he scrabbles to fling him away but he plunges his hand into his pocket and digs out the little rattling-tin shape and with a flailing, hopeless burst of desperation Tim swipes it from his hand and sends it sailing across the room.

He crabs to his feet, scuttling for the precious scrap of memory on the ground and spins to face him, teeth bared in scornful, apoplectic victory.

_What is this?_ he demands, his voice tearing at the seams. _What have you been hiding from me?_

It’s something you need to see, says Tim. The defeat is stark in his tone, his expression pained. But not yet. If you watch that now, it’s gonna ruin everything we’ve been working for.

Traitor.

_Traitor._

He should have expected this. He should have known. Alex got to him first. He got to him first, he turned Tim against him. They all think he’s just some puppet, don’t they. Think they can lead him along by the nose and tug his strings and he’ll just trail meekly behind. He scoops up the camera, _I’m leaving._

Jay, _come back._

_Don’t follow me._

He told him not to follow him.

He’d better listen.

If he doesn’t, he’ll kill him. There’s an ache and an itch in his fingers around the tape. He’ll do it. He knows he can. Traitors and liars. The camera’s the only thing he can trust. The cameras and the tapes. Everything else is filmsy, suggestible, unreliable, easily bendable.

He’ll show them. He’ll prove it to them all.

He won’t be led. He won’t be piloted. He won’t be sculpted into anyone’s soldier.

He’ll unbury his answers, and he’ll do it without the obstructive film of another man’s lies.

\--

If his eyes weren’t so dry from the weeks and months and years without sleep, he knows he would have cried to know that it was all for nothing.

He was right, Tim. All those years in search for her, and it was for nothing. He knew. He doesn’t know for how long, but he knew. He knew she’d been gone.

Alex got to her first after all.

\--

_Tim, if you can see this, we need to talk._

Rosswood again, the camera held in front of him like a talisman. He stares at the little screen and his heart hammers. The place is silent save for the crunch of leaves, the distant shriek of crows.

When he sees it - _is_ he seeing it? It stutters and static snaps and it fades and he startles back, and he can’t know he can’t _know_ for certain if it’s there. Why did he leave. Why hasn’t Tim answered. Tim, Tim come on. Come on, he’s sorry.

He’s sorry. He gets it. He knows.

He’s sorry.

His fingers are red and numb and clumsy with the cold as he scrolls for Tim’s number in his empty contacts list. Tim, and Alex, and Jessica. He’s forgotten everyone else. Or they’ve forgotten him.

Was he always just an anomalous, frictionless thing, dislodged and stuck in someone else’s story? He spent hours, days, reviewing footage, confirming that Alex Kralie _existed._ Did he ever do the same for himself? Was he afraid of what he’d find?

He’s afraid to look too closely at himself, now. He waits for Tim to pick up, but he doesn’t.

Tim, it’s me, he says. I watched the tape I took from you.

Trying to retrace their steps, trying to piece together a kind of narrative, but nothing’s working. The tunnel doesn’t lead to the shack. That doesn’t happen. That isn’t how it _works._ But he can’t remember how it’s supposed to be.

But that layout is wrong, he says, desperate, It’s completely _wrong._

His voice breaks, panicked, hysterical. Tim, pick up. Pick up pick up pick _up._

_Jay? Jay, are you there? Please pick up, please. Your father and I are - we’re worried about you._

Rosswood has either shifted around -

Or I’m starting to lose it. I dunno, maybe both.

His breath is static in his lungs. Panting, panting. It’s there, it’s watching. He has to get out of here. God but he has to get out. He has to turn around, stop peering between trees, stop looking for the thing that can’t be looked at.

Listen, just - call me, as soon as you get this.

_Jay, I know, I know you must be sick of me calling, but - we contacted the police. They keep saying - well, they’ve said a lot of things. We’re just worried. We haven’t heard from you._

And, he says, the word harsh and jagged and painful, I’m _sorry._

He’s sorry.

He’s sorry.

He knows. He knows, and he’s sorry.

Tim, please. _Please._ Pick up, just pick up.

_Jay? They say this number is still registered and, and that it’s still in service. Jay, honey, please. We’re just worried. Please pick up._

I know why you kept that tape from me.

Still, nothing. He’s sorry. He’s sorry. It wasn’t like Alex, he knows that. It wasn’t _like_ Alex, trying to lead him astray. It was warped, and wrong, but he knows it now. It was just - it was just protection. The answers weren’t the only thing. They were never the only thing.

He has to get back. He has to get out of here. The trees are blurring, black to green and back again, the wrinkled bark smoothing into inky spiderweb limbs. He blinks, and the apparition is gone again.

Did the camera catch it? Did the camera lie? It can’t. It doesn’t. It _can’t._ He can’t roll it back to check, not now, not without anyone to watch and hold sentry and keep an eye out on the tree-lined horizon. How is he supposed to know. God, but how is he supposed to _know._ And -

He’s starting to see things he _knows aren’t there -_

\- he _thinks_ aren’t there -

\- and it’s starting to make him feel - _really_ sick.

He has to tear the words out between coughs.

Call me back when you can.

_Call us back when you can._

And then -

And then it’s like an ironclad fist has sunk into his gut and he folds, sinking, gasping, his limbs gone rigid and he feels everything spiraling in a buzz and hum of static and the flickering shadowimage of the dark thing looming in the corner flares before his eyes and he can’t hold onto it, not himself and not anything, and he’s _sorry_ Tim, he’s _sorry,_ please -

just -

\--

Just wanna talk.

He _just wants to talk,_ all right. He’ll talk, and Tim will listen, and he’ll tell him what he knows. The sick traitor can spill everything. No more secrets. _No more secrets,_ said Tim, and his lips curl back in an involuntary sneer. No more secrets. He’d probably gotten a good laugh out of that, hadn’t he. Stupid Jay. Stupid. He fell for it, sank his teeth into that bait. He should’ve known better than to blindly trust. He doesn’t do that anymore.

The knife glints in his hand and his voice wavers.

Just wanna talk.

He steps forward, and Tim is there and wrestling the knife away. He grunts and thrashes, thin limbs straining against the hand as it deftly picks the knife away and disarms him and shoves him into the living room.

Zip ties? Tim spits, his tone dark with outrage.

He stumbles back. 

Just wanna talk, Tim mocks savagely. What were you gonna do?

He watches Tim toss the knife aside, rattling over the countertop. That’s a rookie mistake, Tim. He tenses to run.

Sit down, says Tim, like a parent admonishing a reckless child. _Sit down._

He lurches for the knife, teeth bared in a snarl.

Tim catches him easily around his middle and forces him to the ground. He jerks once, twice, again and again beneath his grip, tasting the filthy fuzz of lint and dust of the rug as Tim mashes his head down, knee levered into the square of his back, and tightens the zip ties around his wrists and ankles in a series of brisk _zzzzz-snp_ s.

Get off, he says. Get _off!_

Tim gets off.

He picks up the camera, _his camera_ and trains it on the man he’s got trussed in the corner of his room. 

You’re a liar, snarls Jay, struggling to wriggle upright, skinny shoulders pressed flat against the nearest wall, his tone ragged with resentment and his face burning with shame.

Tim speaks to him angrily, like he’s in the right, like he isn’t just as wrecked and ruined as the rest of them. He’s no better than Alex. He’s _worse._ Alex was always that wary and hard-edged figure, and Tim committed the unbearable sin of pretending he could be _trusted._ He says something, and the words smear in his ears, all but one.

Jessica. _Jessica._

Just tell me where she _is,_ he says, the last word nearly splitting in the middle.

I don’t know any more than you do, lies Tim.

_I don’t believe you._

He keeps talking, the self-righteous traitorous _bastard,_ leaving Jay here while he intends to go off with _his_ answers and _his_ camera and he’ll _leave_ him here, leave him to be cornered by that _thing_ without the safety of the lens.

He flexes his wrists furiously, digging them into his restraints, the skin tearing away raw and bloody beneath the harsh bite of the zip ties, the horrible pressure of the unyielding plastic.

There is _nothing_ we can do, Tim continues.

It wouldn’t be my fault!

It’s not his fault, it’s _not his fault._ Tim did this, he _did this_ he dragged her off and he _knew where she was_ and he never _told_ him! Bastard, _bastard, bastard,_ this is why no one _trusted_ you.

I looked up that address, Tim is saying, and he isn’t listening, he can’t listen to any more words he’s saying until he speaks firmly and looks at him hard and says, coldly, I’m going there and I am not taking you with me. Not while you’re like this.

Like _what._ Seeing him for what he is? Seeing him being the liar _totheark_ always said he was?

No. No, he _can’t, he can’t!_ He flexes his wrists again, the plastic cutting viciously into his skin. He can’t stop him. He can’t do anything, bound and helpless like this, but Tim can’t just _leave him here._

Wait, he says, pleading, hating himself for pleading, Tim, just - leave my camera.

Tim looks at him with that cold, merciless glint.

He knows the look.

It’s Alex. It’s _Alex_ staring out at him through those eyes as Tim shakes his head, his jaw tight.

No, says Tim, and leaves the room.

Leave my camera, Jay begs, _howls,_ I _need it! Give it to me!_

He can hear the door starting to swing shut.

_Tim!_

The door closes on his screams. He writhes against himself, desperate to tear himself apart against the awful vice of those things wrapped around his wrists and his legs and he can’t break free he can’t rip himself loose he strains to sink his teeth into the flesh of his wrists but can’t reach chafes the skin off his wrists in an effort to lubricate the zip ties with his own leaking red but it’s not enough to scrape away those teeth that keep biting and keep hold and he looks up, down, away, hopeless, looking for it, always watching for it in the corner of his _eye_ because the lens is gone, the camera’s gone, and he can’t see it _he can’t see it_ and he can’t know when it’s here because _the camera’s gone_ he jerks at the bonds again and again until he’s panting and breathless on the floor and still nothing gives away he’s caught he’s caught and alone and afraid and at the mercy of whatever finds him first, Tim or Alex or the thing that’ll find him and rip him apart, flay his mind from the inside out and he whimpers because he doesn’t want this he doesn’t want to die

Tim did this to him. He’ll never let him go. He’ll never let him go. Tim did this to him.

He has to find him. He has to find him and _make him tell him_ what he did, what he _did_ to Jessica. He’s hiding it from him. He’s lying. He always lies. He chokes back a sob. He always lies. Didn’t totheark warn him. HE IS A LIAR. He was right. He was right, and he should’ve listened.

There are no days anymore, just the times when he struggles and the times where he is too tired and his throat is too dry and his limbs too weak to fight the zip ties that keep him tethered here.

When the man in the hood enters with the knife, he struggles back. No. No, please, no, he doesn’t want to die _please._

He stops in front of him. He looks at him from beneath that mask, the lopsided eyes with the frowning mouth, and sets the camera delicately down and drops the knife just out of his reach, then turns, then leaves.

Panic suffuses him in a colorless tide, and then it’s gone again.

He doesn’t know him, doesn’t trust the bastard any further than he can throw Tim. He’s hiding everything from him, even more answers. Tim’s no better, and once he’s done with Tim, totheark is next. He swears that. He promises himself that.

He rakes through cupboards, overturning empty bottles that once held that precious medication, that clatter hollowly as he discards them with a grunt of frustration. He needs those pills. He needs them.

He knows who has them.

\--

The trek through the school is miserable and he’s trembling subtly, but it doesn’t matter. Tim’s here. He knows Tim’s here. Tim and totheark and Alex. This is where it happens, he knows it. This is where the answers are laid bare, and where he doesn’t leave until he has them. His feet slap wetly against the concrete, the air crisp with petrichor.

Tim’s car is empty, and locked. He moves on. Time enough to find him later.

He glimpses a flutter of beige-brown like a bird flitting between trees.

Hey, he calls. Hey, wait!

He tears up the stairs.

Where’s Alex? he demands. _Where are you keeping him?_

He slows when he sees he has him cornered, but he skitters from between his ~~claws~~ hands and swings at him, misses, and is back down and away again before he can catch him. Gone, gone _again._ Answers dodging him left and right and no one will stay _still_ and tell him the _truth._

Tim darts from one room to another, a dark blur on the screen. He slinks after, growls in frustration when he kicks into a chair and it crashes to the ground. Tim whips around, the beam of his flashlight sluicing through the dark before his feet beat a rapid tattoo away. No, _no._ He can’t lose him, not again. He knows something, he knows he does. He’s keeping everything from him, he’s ruining _everything._ He’s hiding her, Jessica, away from him and he _knows_ he _knows where she is._ Why won’t anyone stop _running._ No one will hold _still._ What do they have to lose. What do they have to _hide_ anymore. He knows what they are, liars, all of them. Lying and hiding and still, and _still_ no one will tell him anything directly.

Where’s Alex. Where is everyone hiding him. Where _is_ he.

He thought he was supposed to _end_ this. He picks up the knife on the table and holds it slack in his hand. _Find Alex. Find the ark._ Isn’t this what it’s always been about? Isn’t this what everyone wanted? Answers, finally. Alex, Tim, totheark, everyone. It’s always been them, them against him, aligned in an axis of leading him astray. He’ll find them. He can hunt them all down. He has nothing left to lose, and he’ll track them down and he’ll find his answers. He’ll rip them out of every one of them if he needs to.

Why is everyone running? Stop _running._

\--

Why is he running?

He’s down the stairs and streaking for the door from which Tim ran, a coward and a liar, and he wrenches the door open and plunges inside. Everything’s dark, the chairs lining the room like soldiers. The walls are swollen and bubbled with water damage, debris clicking every now and then beneath his feet.

_What is this? What have you been hiding from me?_

There are footsteps.

He twists around.

\--

Alex? says a man, the word a whisper and a prayer. Alex?

\--

He jerks as the bullet meets flesh and sets him on fire in a slow awful spread of pain in a scarlet inflorescence down his side. He spins, limps, hobbles, makes it as far as the next room to slam the door shut and slide down. Each rattling thump of a body throwing itself against the door sends another spasm of pain slipping down through his side, punched into his liver, oh _god._ He’s bleeding, he’s bleeding, thick red crusting along the edges of his fingers and the dark warm patch spreading through his clothes and he can’t stop coughing.

No, no, _no_ this can’t be how it - this can’t be -

His answers, his answers. Did they lie? They can’t have, _please._ Find Alex, find the ark, find the answers, find _Jessica._ But he’s coughing and heaving and shivering against an old shuddering door and something spits up the in the corner of the screen, _no._

No, no _please._ No, he wasn’t done he wasn’t _done._

He can’t go. He can’t be left like this. The echoes of Alex pounding against the door get louder and the thing tips its head lazily to one side and it reaches for him and no, no, god, oh god, he doesn’t want to die, god, please, he doesn't want to die, he _doesn’t want to die -_


End file.
